Here I am
waiting for the whiskey
to stop being coy
and finally kick in.
Rome is burning outside
but the flames haven't
crept near yet.
Front row seats
to the end of an era
that I'll soon have to pay for.
I can already smell the smoke
and see the angry glow
against the weeping sky.
But I have some time yet
before the air gets hot
and the streets become
screaming rivers of humanity.
Bearing witness now
to the weeping heart
and fate's feckless whim.
Outside, Rome is burning
as the tide of time reaches
out to find the high water mark.
All for a dream
a half formed and
half thought impulse,
the urge to conquer
not a woman or a nation
but the whispers of the psyche.
Soon now the fat lady
will sing her rusted heart out
and I'll see the last great age
fall to the caprices of a power
that I will never comprehend.
Rome is on fire
and in that destruction
might something else
be born?
The histories of nations
the folly of man
the lives of the great
replayed again within
the lives of those
whom I love.
The center is indeed crumbling
and we of the flesh,
we cannot hold.

I guess it's a hard thing to break down and accept, this understanding that one has burned that white picket fence and one story ranch home down. This septic knowledge that the woman who loved you is now, at this very moment probably snorting another line of fantastic yay. I'd like to think that I did well by her in the years since we first met. But I know I'd be wrong. The truth is, I'm too much of a broken child to understand love when it snaps it's fingers in front of my face. She trusted me, needed me, and I ran as far and hard as I could to get away from what we meant to eachother. I thought I was brave and strong, but I was just a coward in the end. I know, deep inside

These being the words of a tired poet
desperately fighting to rekindle a dying flame.
This being the end of an era spent chasing shadows
and loving weeping ghosts.

Take this heart within your hands
before the body that belongs to it fades.
Do it now, go on and take it while
the light still breathes in this place.

My time here is ended, if I ever really
was of here to begin with, perhaps more of
a wanderer than I realized in those blue sky
days when our love had a body and a soul.

But you, your time is now and it is a perilous one,
in this world slipping away, turning inward.
So carry this heart with you into the night,
talisman of the old world, last of the fading light.

I can tell you about the girl.

Her freckles were beige constellations,
and her voice was husky and rasped
like birds before the churning of a storm.

She was weird and laughed at everything I said -
which made her even weirder,
because I'm only funny in certain photos
and in certain clothes.

Her left arm was covered in scars and burns.
"As you can tell, I'm right handed," she said.
Arthritis surrounded her wrists and other joints,
and all I could think about were my
grandmother's arthritis crippled hands,
and if the girl would thank the arthritis, one day,
for no longer allowing her to self-harm.

One of her feet were bigger than the other
and, when she walked, she would lose balance.
"I'm not sure if the world is too fast
or if I'm too slow. Then again," she winked,
"it's probably because of my feet."
I liked her because she treated me like a person,
but didn't take me as seriously
as I took myself.

I struggled with self-respect
and she struggled with a drug addiction.
Her arm was needle park
and sometimes she missed ******
more than she missed me.

She wasn't the type of girl to shake
without her drugs -
she'd, instead, talk about them
like they were old friends.
She understood them
more than she understood herself.

After a few months of ***
and, "I'll be sad when you leave,"s,
I called her my girlfriend
and she smiled.
Flecks of speckled angles, bright,
I saw her, first, she accepted
my night.

Five days later,
she overdosed on morphine.
I picked her up.

Her eyes were glazed over.
I said, "I love you,
but this is *******."
She cried and said,
"Forgive me."

I lain in bed, next to her -
next to the avoidance of death.
She asked how I was
and I said, "Everything I write is ****,
but I'm glad I can write ****** poetry
about how we'll be okay."

She asked, "We will be okay, right?"

I hope.

Here it comes again,
that feeling known so well,
when your heart hurts
and things start to stretch.

The machine you're trying to type
on is starting to fail,
the words you're trying to speak
are sounding cheap and ill used.

There is something you know,
deep down inside,
some seriously heavy hitting truth
trying to claw it's way out of you,
a drop of strange, a hint of deja vu.

Pulling back from the lies you've told
to yourself, afraid to see what is...
and what ought to have been.

I'm afraid to go through that door,
shedding the faces and skins I've worn
for so long, but I know that I have to
open it and walk through standing tall.

Shuffle up and get down low,
the calender says it's a different day
and a different year,
but it only ever feels like it
during the day.

Sitting here tonight, I'm typing
into a different phone,
drinking at a different bar,
but somehow it's essentially the
same night that I've been living
for ten years...maybe more.

The same words, the same feeling
of a knife in the heart, the same
Irish jigs playing through busted speakers, and what I think I'll find somewhere in the haze still eluding.

All flowing back into a night so often repeated in so many places...Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Florida, even the night in Nogales I never mention.

It all comes back to girls with razors in their purses, the boys who put them there, and the unseen hand that has pushed them all.

THIRTY-TWO Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks
        stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel.
Now they hold their toes and ankles
        to the drift of running water.
Then they go to the bunk cars
        and eat mulligan and prune sauce,
Smoke one or two pipefuls, look at the stars,
        tell ****** stories
About men and women they have known,
        countries they have seen,
Railroads they have built-
        and then the deep sleep of children.